This invention relates to a method of operating a touch-screen device and to a touch-screen device. The invention provides a system, method and user interface for capturing diacritics on multi-touch devices.
Multi-touch devices (such as modern phones or tablet computers) are becoming increasingly powerful and popular. The size and speed of these devices has increased over time. However, the size of these portable devices also restricts the size of the touch-screen display that can be used to enter or view text. Those devices usually provide virtual keyboards with a limited number of directly accessible characters to display the biggest possible part of the document being edited. This means that accented characters, or more generally characters with diacritics, require additional inputs from the user.
To enter accented characters (or characters with diacritics), an existing solution is to tap and hold the button for the letter that most closely resembles the character that the user is trying to type. While holding the key down, an additional menu will appear and the user then has to slide their finger to the desired letter with the diacritic. This approach suffers from three major issues. The overall character input speed is slowed down since the user has to wait for the additional menu to appear. Furthermore, the additional menu must present to the user as many keys as possible combinations of diacritics on that letter. And thirdly, this feature is hard to find and many people do not even notice it exists.
Another technique called auto-complete exists and consists of predicting a word or a part of the word based on what has already been typed. This feature is effective when editing text written in a highly-structured, easy-to-predict language but is not suitable for all natural languages. This approach also slows down the overall character input speed since the user has to pick one of the possible prediction in a menu. A third solution called auto-correction (also known as text replacement or replace as you type) takes advantage of a spell checker to correct common spelling or typing errors. By using an auto-correct dictionary, this approach can add diacritics on letters depending on the characters being typed but in certain situations, automatic corrections can cause problems like in technical and scientific writing.